Fediverse

lemmy is like reddit. mastodon is like twitter. the difference between each and their corporate versions is that lemmy and mastadon each are services that don't run on one, central server but on many, independent "instances" (servers) which "federate" with each other and with the larger "fediverse" where they're able to interoperate.

Lemmy and Mastadon, being different but similar services, can interoperate a little bit, but only so far as that lemmy content can be seen in the Mastadon app (if configured properly) but not vice-versa.

does that answer your question?

@Absence209 Who says that you don't see any Mastodon content in Lemmy? This comment is posted from Mastodon!

You need to specifically reach the content of other platforms. They won't pop up in your feed if you're not following them or they don't post at a subLem.

You can use the search to find a mastodon user, follow him (sub) and read his posts.

Without being a historian of the fediverse, I am old enough to have seen it somehow grow.

The great old ones would be identi.ca open-source micro-blog engine, and Diaspora* when some student raised money to build a free and decentralized alternative to facebook over the summer-break, it was like 2010.

In the Mid 2010's the Mastodon project started to build a free/decentralized twitter clone. At the time twitter was already a shithole, so it got some attention, and grew steadily attracting open-source enthusiasts, at the point that today it's the most popular fediverse.

In parallel, a video-sharing platform compatible with Mastodon was built, it's the famous peertube, then a Photo-sharing platform appeared, the famous pixelfed.

Lemmy is relatively recent, and got a lot of traction recently. Just like Mastodon/Peertube, it uses the Activity Pub protocol and is part of the fediverse. It means that I can see lemmy content from Mastodon. However, I tried to comment a Lemmy thread from Masto and it didn't worked.

The reason why many people talk about Mastodon, is because it's like the most popular fediverse. I just try to see my Mastodon account from my lemmy account, but looks like it's not working (yet).

Another cool thing is that you can interact with Kbins magasine from Lemmy and the other way around, so no need to have two separated accounts